Lois Banner marks 50 years since Marilyn Monroe’s death with a detailed, sympathetic biography

Even before her untimely, though not entirely unexpected, death 50 years ago next month, Marilyn Monroe was the platinum blond standard of a sex symbol. All breathy shake and shimmy on the outside, her high-profile trysts and marriages, notorious work habits and mental instability also made her perfect fodder for the gossip rags.

Since her death, Monroe’s life has been examined, interpreted and packaged, the broad sketch of an icon becoming ever more detailed by new revelations uncovered over the decades. The volume of Monroe material hitting the marketplace to coincide with the grim anniversary shows that there’s still plenty of demand for even finer detail about the troubled star’s life, and feminist scholar Lois Banner answers the call with her exhaustively researched biography, “Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox.”

Monroe scholarship is competitive business, and Banner isn’t shy about pointing out where her biography trumps those that came before. By interviewing hundreds of people and combing through reams of records, Banner fills in the nomadic years of Monroe’s childhood, tracing her transition from a shy, athletic tomboy with a stuttering problem to a spiritual adolescent, raised mostly in the Christian Science Church, who found her place in the world once she hit puberty and selected the perfect, tightfitting red sweater to win over the boys at school.

Banner delivers the first complete roster of the 11 foster homes Monroe lived in after her mother’s hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia and is the first to identify the likely perpetrators of the sexual abuse that traumatized Monroe as a child and tormented her as an adult, a fact she discussed publicly in interviews — a rare and brave act at the time.

Once Monroe hits adulthood, the author evaluates her subject under an array of lenses — from fashion (no undergarments, please) to Freudian psychology. We come to know Monroe as an aspiring intellectual and a fervent supporter of civil rights whose politics veered far left, perhaps more so than her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, who was famously investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In fact, Monroe is a featured player in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI files.

Banner doesn’t just document the star’s promiscuity (the descriptions of the sexual escapades inside the Lawford-Kennedy compound are seedy, to say the least), but she puts them into the context of Monroe’s likely sexual addiction, which the author posits was the result of her sexual abuse and, quite possibly, her reluctant bisexuality. Banner identifies several of Monroe’s friendships as long-term lesbian relationships, though it’s not clear how certain she is of these claims.

But it’s the revelations about Monroe’s strong friendships that make the star feel most human. Unstable and insecure as she was, Monroe made for a wonderful friend — especially to men, no surprise — valued for her sense of humor and intellectual curiosity. It’s hard not to wish you could tag along with the chummy trio of Monroe, director Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller (years before their courtship).